


What's in a Smile

by brightredbirdie



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/F, body horror?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 19:41:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6022417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightredbirdie/pseuds/brightredbirdie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Madame Masque and the Black Widow -- for the latter, it seems, having fought once doesn't mean you can't get along. And get along they do. But as Dottie takes on more and more of Whitney Frost, things change, and there may be no going back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What's in a Smile

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the lovely [covertwallace](http://covertwallace.tumblr.com/), who can't keep her sad headcanons to her damn self!
> 
> Written between eps 2.05 and 2.06, when "Life of the Party" airs some canon non-compliance may occur.

Whitney Frost is dead.

Well, as good as. Dead to the public eye. A faint memory to the media. She disappeared almost a year ago, dropped off the face of the earth, and -- who knows. No one pursued the story, not after Honey Harrington so completely recaptured the hearts of America. (The public eye is a fickle sweetheart.)

Whitney Frost is dead, and the woman in the mask doesn't mourn. She may have put on a mask, but she's shed a facade-- Whitney was a cheap glamor, a tool to bend men to her will. Some might say that when she put on the mask she created an alter ego, but she knows better.

She created herself.

\----

Dottie Underwood can make herself into whatever she wants to be-- so the question is, who is it she wants?

An easy answer, at first. Peggy Carter was _everything_. And then-- And then Peggy needs her help. And it dinges her shine a bit.

And _then_ she meets Whitney Frost. What Peggy is, Whitney is tenfold-- clever; composed; beautiful, even with the strange black scar running across her temple; adored by a nation. Dottie watches them fight, fights Whitney herself. She's no agent, but she's... fun. And, if anything Peggy tells her about this case is true, she's smarter than anyone Dottie has ever known. (And Dottie has met men who were considered great minds.)

Whitney Frost makes it an easy question to answer once again -- and then she vanishes.

\----

Just when she thinks she's left Whitney Frost behind, the ghost of her old life finds her once again-- surprisingly literally.

She opens her door one day and there she is. Whitney Frost, if she didn't know any better, in the flesh. She's a near perfect replica, from the perfectly curled hair to the exact brushstrokes of her make up. Even the coy emptiness of her smile is familiar.

"Hello, Whi--" Her doppleganger stops, her beaming smile for a moment taking on a very real edge. "Oh. I'm afraid I don't know what to call you now."

\----

Dottie is an obvious asset. She'd be dense not to see that. (She'd be as vacuous as they all used to think.) She's fast, strong, dilligent....well-trained. An excellent piece of muscle. Not a team player, but then she recognizes that in herself, as well. She choreographs Dottie's work to be mostly alone, or in charge of dedicated men, and that seems to do just fine.

She can ignore the way the other woman watches her-- unblinking, intense, obvious. It's less predatory than the leers she used to get from every man she passed, but it's still somehow more disquieting.

It's a gaze she'd thought she'd never feel again.

\----

When Dottie kisses her, it burns a little-- the vodka the other woman has been drinking. She's sensed Dottie can be quite the seductress when she wants to be, but this isn't that. Their teeth clash, and she nearly tumbles backwards. This is heady and desperate, a longtime thirst coming to fruition.

\----

They're in Los Angeles the first time a journalist spots Dottie. The headlines the next day are all about the ghost the woman in the mask had thought she'd buried-- WHITNEY FROST SPOTTED IN LOS ANGELES, and MISSING STARLET: WHERE IS SHE NOW? They have a good laugh over it, and Dottie seems not to think too much of it, but something heavy settles in her stomach.

When the first talent scout approaches Dottie about a role, she convinces herself it's for the best-- better they fix their eyes on her paramour than herself. The woman in the mask can exist only in the shadows; now Dottie will become another mask, another shroud to hide behind.

When the second comes it's a little harder to think that way; and the third, and the fourth, and the fifth...

\----

She wakes at a witching hour, head already pounding. Whitney Frost is dead, she reminds herself. She doesn't need to depend on her smile any longer. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

She carefully slips out of bed, leaving Dottie warm and still behind her, and wraps her arms around her own chest. It doesn't matter. But she sits at the armoire, stares into the ruined face that only two people have seen and lived to describe, and... It matters.

Dottie's eyeliner finds its way into her hand almost without her knowing, and she finds herself crawling back into bed, leaning over her lover.

This is how it started for her-- fractures stretching across her face, dark and marring. She traces the patterns from memory, and in the darkened from the eyeliner mimicks her old wounds almost perfectly. When she sits back a while later, Dottie is the image of Whitney Frost at the start of her downfall.

\----

It becomes a nightly thing. Dottie gets more and more offers, takes bigger and bigger roles.

The woman in the mask paints cracks across her face as age sleeps, and hates then both for it.

\----

She comes back to the man --a hireling, she can't remember his name for her life-- looking striken, clearly chosen by his peers to deliver bad news. But she doesn't expect what he tells her, wouldn't have in a thousand years.

When she finds her, Dottie is in their bedroom, sitting by the armoire and smiling into the mirror-- at least, that's what she thinks she's doing. It's hard to tell, now.

The bottle lays broken in the floor, its contents --an acid she'd been using in her latest experiments-- spreading around it. She can see it already beginning to eat away at the wood.

"What did you do?" is all she can manage.

She can't tear her eyes away from her lover's ruined face.

"I thought you knew." Dottie turns, and the sound of her voice carries the same overbright beaminess as their first meeting. "I'm a problem-solver."


End file.
